tailchaser 0.2.0

the ultimate tailer

The ultimate rotation and windows friendly log tailer plus a lot more…

• backfills rotated files

• handles gz and bz2 files

• handles multi line records

• doesn’t break windows rotating log handlers

• easy to extend

• Free software: BSD license

• other than six pure Python stdlib.

Installation

pip install tailchaser

Thsi will install the tailchaser library in your site-packages and it will also add the script tailchase to your Scripts directory.

Usage

$ tailchase /where/my/logs/*.log

$ tailchase -h

usage: tailchase [-h] [--only-backfill] [--dont-backfill]
               [--clear-checkpoint] [--read-period READ_PERIOD]
               [--read-pause READ_PAUSE] [--reading-from {unix,win}]
               [--temp-dir TEMP_DIR]
               [--logging {DEBUG,INFO,WARN,ERROR,CRITICAL}]
               file-pattern


positional arguments:
  file-pattern          The file pattern to tail, such as /var/log/access.*

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --only-backfill       dont't tail, default: False
  --dont-backfill       basically only tail, default: False
  --clear-checkpoint    start form the begining, default: False
  --read-period READ_PERIOD
                    how long you read before you pause. If zero you don't
                    pause, default: 1
  --read-pause READ_PAUSE
                    how long you pause between reads, default: 0
  --reading-from PLATFORM
                    sets how long you read and then pause can be one of {unix,win}, default: win
  --temp-dir TEMP_DIR   on back fill files are copied to a temp directory.Use
                    this to set this directory, default: None
  --logging LEVEL
                    logging level it can be one of  DEBUG,INFO,WARN,ERROR,CRITICAL, default: ERROR

In its simplest form

In its simplest form tailchase works like a combination of cat and tail -f except it will start with the oldest rotated file. So if you were to have

/var/log/opendirectoryd.log
/var/log/opendirectoryd.log.0
/var/log/opendirectoryd.log.1
/var/log/opendirectoryd.log.2
/var/log/opendirectoryd.log.3
/var/log/opendirectoryd.log.4

it would first output the text of /var/log/opendirectoryd.log.4, then /var/log/opendirectoryd.log.3, etc. until it reached the newest file then when it has reached the end of /var/log/opendirectoryd.log revert to a “tail -f” behaviour.

So if you were to do

tailchase 'tests/logs/opendirectoryd.*'

“note: In bash you need to quote the wildcard otherwise it will be expanded into the scripts argv array.”

you would get something like

2015-12-24 15:39:56.733754 EST - AID: 0x0000000000000000 - Registered node with name '/Contacts'
2015-12-24 15:39:56.733933 EST - AID: 0x0000000000000000 - Registered node with name '/LDAPv3' as hidden
2015-12-24 15:39:56.736154 EST - AID: 0x0000000000000000 - Registered node with name '/Local' as hidden
2015-12-24 15:39:56.736868 EST - AID: 0x0000000000000000 - Registered node with name '/NIS' as hidden
2015-12-24 15:39:56.737134 EST - AID: 0x0000000000000000 - Discovered configuration for node name '/Search' at path '       2015-12-24 15:39:56.737151 EST - AID: 0x0000000000000000 - Registered node with name '/Search'
2015-12-24 15:39:56.738794 EST - AID: 0x0000000000000000 - Loaded bundle at path '/System/Library/OpenDirectory/Modules     2015-12-24 15:39:56.740509 EST - AID: 0x0000000000000000 - Loaded bundle at path '/System/Library/OpenDirectory/Modules/

Coding with tailchaser

Using the tailchaser library in a project is probably best done by example.

Example 1 - Tailchase to a REST service.

#
# Example 1 - Tail to Elastic
#

import requests

import tailchaser

class TailToElastic(tailchaser.Tailer):
    def handoff(self, file_tailed, checkpoint, record):
        """ Expect a record like:

        20160204 10:28:15,525 INFO PropertiesLoaderSupport - Loading properties file from URL [file:C:/WaterWorks/Broken/BSE//config/lme-market.properties]
        20160204 10:28:15,541 INFO PropertiesLoaderSupport - Loading properties file from URL [file:C:/WaterWorks/Broken/BSE//config/default-database.properties]
        20160204 10:28:15,541 INFO PropertiesLoaderSupport - Loading properties file from URL [file:C:/WaterWorks/Broken/BSE//config/default-hibernate.properties]
        """

        date, time, level, source, _, message = record.split(5)
        result = requests.json("http://someelacticserver.com:9200/myindex/log", json={
                        'timestamp': '{}T{}'.format(date, time)
                        'level': level,
                        'source': source,
                        'message': message
                        })
        return result.status_code == requests.codes.ok

Example 2 - Tailchase to Kafka

#
# Example 2 - Tail to Kafka - shows how to add your own arguments and then send messages to kafka.
#
import msgpack
import tailchaser
from kafka import KafkaProducer

class TailToKafka(tailchaser.Tailer):
    def add_arguments(cls, parser=None):
        parser = super(TailToKafka, cls).add_arguments(parser)

    HOSTS = 'localhost:1234'
    TOPIC = 'log'
    def startup(self):
        self.kafka_producer = KafkaProducer(bootstrap_servers=self.HOSTS,value_serializer=msgpack.dumps)


    def handoff(self, file_tailed, checkpoint, record):
        """ Expect a record like:

        20160204 10:28:15,525 INFO PropertiesLoaderSupport - Loading properties file from URL [file:C:/WaterWorks/Broken/BSE//config/lme-market.properties]
        20160204 10:28:15,541 INFO PropertiesLoaderSupport - Loading properties file from URL [file:C:/WaterWorks/Broken/BSE//config/default-database.properties]
        20160204 10:28:15,541 INFO PropertiesLoaderSupport - Loading properties file from URL [file:C:/WaterWorks/Broken/BSE//config/default-hibernate.properties]
        """
        self.kafka_producer.send(self.TOPIC, record).get(timeout=10)
        return True

Documentation

https://tailchaser.readthedocs.org/

Development

To run the all tests run:

tox

Note, to combine the coverage data from all the tox environments run:

Windows	set PYTEST_ADDOPTS=--cov-append tox
Other	PYTEST_ADDOPTS=--cov-append tox

Changelog

0.1.0 (2016-02-21)

• First release on PyPI.

0.1.2 (2016-04-05)

• Add multi-line record support - #3

• add –start-of-record-re option for multi-line records. - #4

• move argparser definition from cli to Tailer class. - #5

0.1.3 (2016-04-12)

• Added break tail tests and fixes drived from it - #6

• fixed app description ! - #7